Devil’s Wake (23 page)

“I’d put on the brake if I was setting a trap, too,” Dean said.

“And if I was a freak, I’d be hanging close to the bus,” Ursalina
said. “If they slept there, they’d stay there. Especially if it was a proven hunting ground.” She sounded confident.

“Is that gospel? I mean, did the army figure that out about freaks, or are you guessing?”

“Little of both,” she said.

Hipshot growled and barked again. The roadblock could be a trap, or infested with freaks. Or both.

“It’s a good trap,” Terry said. “Ground down here is slippery, and they might be dug in.” He raised his voice. “Volunteers to check out the bus and get us moving?”

Ursalina raised her hand. And Piranha. And Sonia.

“Easy peasy,”
Sonia said. “Let’s do this.”

“Cover us,” Piranha said, his eyes cutting into Darius.

Darius stroked his rifle’s long barrel. No witty comeback this time.

Terry was surprised Ursalina wanted to volunteer. He would have preferred to keep her behind as a sniper like Darius and Dean, but she knew her skills better than he did.

Ursalina huddled with Piranha and Sonia at the front of the bus. “No mistakes,” Ursalina said. “In and out.”

“Agreed. No treasure-hunting, even for gas,” Piranha said. “No time.”

The three of them examined one another’s weapons, bumped fists.

“If you get swarmed, don’t be a hero,” Terry said. “Get back to the bus.”

Everything important had been said. They all knew the rest. A swarm could make this the end of their ride. Pirates would be just as bad. Worse. Bullets killed at a distance. Several angles on the situation
cast a bad light. The delay was a mistake waiting to happen.

Ursalina, Piranha, and Sonia were bundled in their warmest jackets and sweatshirts, but they would be cold. Cold muscles were slow muscles.

Terry almost told them not to go. Ashland was looking better all the time.

Hipshot growled again as Ursalina opened the bus door.

T
he
wind hit Piranha like flecks of frozen sandpaper. His eyes, which were already dry, stung in the snow.

But dry snow made him less likely to lose his footing in a spray of slush. He was wearing a heavy pea jacket liberated from Vern Stoffer’s closet. He was glad the man had been a hunter. Piranha stepped down from the bus well onto the pavement and paused, listening while he shielded his face. On the crest of the Siskiyou Mountains, the wind bit through his jacket like a freak gnawing at his flesh.

“Ow,” Sonia said.

“Ow is right,” Ursalina said. “Let’s finish and get back on the bus.” Ursalina’s gaze was everywhere, and nowhere. Roving constantly, fixing for a moment on a snow-covered lump, and then moving on to another. There: the shadow of a tree. There: a car covered with snow, only a single window exposed. Darkness within. Was there motion?

The stalled bus was a Goliath Tours special. With a bus that big, no chains, it was perfectly reasonable that it had slid across the road, crashed into the car…

Except that there wasn’t enough damage to the car. The two vehicles were linked too carefully, leaning into each other, blocking the road.

The southbound lane of the freeway was on the west side of a
divide, the north lane a hundred yards east, across a ravine. Piranha looked toward it, ruefully. Was it less crowded? Would it make any sense to back all the way down the mountain and try the northbound lane? Should he make the suggestion to Terry?

“I’m going in,” Piranha said instead. “Watch my six.”

“Got it,” Ursalina said, and her voice gave him confidence. Ursalina had training, not just good intentions. “Watch yourself. Check the seats.”

The bus’s door was a standard accordion. It was closed, but Piranha doubted it was locked. He wiped snow from the glass and peered in. No one in the driver’s seat. And as far as he could see, no one in the bus, dead or alive.

“Crowbar,” he said, and Sonia handed over their standard equipment for road clearing. He twisted the flat edge in the doorjamb. The door sighed and then opened enough for him to get his fingers in. He set his feet and pulled.

It opened. Piranha climbed up and shone his flashlight back into the passenger section.
Nothing.
The bus was empty except for blankets and a few empty boxes. Piranha poked at the large mound of blankets on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

“They must have gotten out on foot,” Piranha said.

“What about the brake?” Sonia called up.

He looked. He didn’t know buses like Terry, but beneath the steering wheel a long-handled red emergency brake was yanked tight. “Yeah. Someone set it. I’m taking it off, and then we can get the hell out of here.” He pulled up and then eased it down. “Tell Terry I’m putting her in neutral. I can steer if he pushes.”

“Okay.”

Footsteps as Sonia ran back to the Blue Beauty. Piranha peered to look for Ursalina, but he didn’t see her and hadn’t heard her go anywhere. She was checking out the bus, no doubt. Or seeing if she could start the car.

Piranha sat. The cab’s air was chilly, the metal cold to the touch. The seat, on the other hand, was just a little… warm.

Damn.

“Don’t move.” The voice was quiet enough to be imaginary, and very close. Male. Piranha felt pressure at the small of his back. The gun fit through the gap in the driver’s seat, some kind of hole; someone was hiding in the blankets behind him. “Keep your mouth shut. We just want a little food. A little food isn’t worth dying over.”

The man sounded reasonable. Maybe he was hungry. Hungry and reasonable.

Yeah, right.
They just want food. Not the bus. Not the guns, gas, or girls.

Piranha glanced up at the mirror, but the stranger was out of his view behind his seat. “What do you want me to do?” Piranha said, barely moving his lips.

“I like that question, son, because that’s the question people ask when they want to live.” The stranger had a shark’s voice, seductive enough to convince a shipwrecked sailor to surrender his raft. “You’re going to tell the one with the pretty dark hair to step on up into the bus.”

Piranha’s back stiffened. Was he talking about Sonia or Ursalina? Did it matter?

“Do it.” The voice was more anxious, losing patience. Piranha looked to his left, out the open door. Sonia was already on her way back, her dark hair whipping across her cheek. Her earlobes were red in the cold.
I need you to keep me warm,
she always said.

Piranha felt the pressure of the gun against his back and smelled the whisperer’s sour breath as he raised his voice. “I’m counting to three, and if you don’t call the girl over here, I’ll blow your spine out of your black ass.”

Despite the cold, a trickle of sweat wound its way down Piranha’s back.

Dive for the door? Take a chance the guy was bluffing, or wouldn’t be quick enough on the trigger? He might fire and miss.

But if you get shot for real—shot ANYWHERE—we’ve got no doctor.

Piranha stared out of the bus’s windshield. He only saw the flurries of snow, but more gun-toting pirates could be out there. He and his friends might have walked away alive if they’d only been asked to give up bus, weapons, and food. Walk for two hours south, and they’d be out of the snow and into California.

“One…”

The one with the pretty dark hair.
On the radio, guys on pirate stations promised weapons, food, gas, you name it, for young females. Three girls were treasure. But how could he live with himself if he gave up even one of them, especially Sonia?

Piranha sighed, his hands tight on the steering wheel. His legs were tired and stiff from the cold and sitting still. A burst of fear blossomed in his gut, new and strong and terrible. Maybe Ursalina had been right: there was no way for all of them to survive.

“Two…”

So
this
was how he would die…

“Sonia…
RUN!
” Piranha shouted, at the same time he moved to duck.

Piranha heard the shot before he felt it, a sting of pain that was oddly nonlocalized. In his face.
I’ve been shot in the back. Why do I feel it in my face—

A scream came from behind him. Piranha whipped his head around in time to see a rat-faced, red-haired man with sunken cheeks sliding down against the left wall of the bus, blood seeping from between splayed fingers pressed against his chest.

Ursalina! She must have been watching as quietly as a cat. Through the spiderweb’s cracks in the windshield, Piranha saw the soldier drop into a shooter’s one-kneed crouch, firing at the freeway’s
western bank. Snow exploded.

Piranha touched his face, expecting to find a mangled mess… but he was all right. The broken windshield had scattered glass shards across his face. His eyes blinked furiously as he panicked, thinking he’d lost one of his last two contact lenses, but he kept calm enough to gently brush the glass away. His eyes itched like hell, but he tested both; some of the edges were fuzzy because his contacts were old, but he could see.

If he was blinded, he was dead. This was an ambush.

Bullets cracked and whistled from both sides, but Piranha dove to get out of the bus, rolling into the snow while he held his gun clear. He was breathing through his mouth; air was suddenly hard to come by. The gunfire was muffled. Piranha shook his head to clear his ears of snow, trying to orient himself.

Where were Sonia and Ursalina now? Where were the shooters?

Piranha turned and studied the snowbank to his right, west of the road. Through the drifting snow he could make out a parked car, covered in a foot and a half of white. The car was of medium size, a Ford Taurus or something, and the top of its snow-crusted window was a slightly different shade of white. As if someone had rolled the window down just an inch or two, and then stuck a flap of white cloth over the slit.

And something on the ground, between the tree and the car. With a narrow shadow to guide his vision, he saw a lump… with a hole in it… and something black, like a pipe, just sticking out a little bit. Hunting blind, his uncle in Georgia would have called it. Trying to pincer them.

Bullets kicked up powder on all sides of Piranha. He had no clear targets. He couldn’t see Ursalina or Sonia, or where they were shooting, and he was under heavy fire from people who could see him fine.

Piranha leaped back into the stalled tour bus, keeping his head low. A
ping
across the bus’s nose missed him as he ducked inside. He
gasped for air.

Separated.

Freaks would be easier, he thought. Freaks couldn’t pin you with gunfire.

T
he
side window behind Kendra erupted, showering her with icy glass.

She’d always thought the roadblock looked phony. It was a little too neat, a little… staged. It didn’t capture the wild I’ve-got-an-infected-hitchhiker-in-the-backseat-let-me-the-hell-out-of-here turmoil she saw in most of the other cars. Or even one of the Oh-my-God-I’m-sleepy… let-me-just-pull-over-and-get-a-nap-and-then-I’ll-be-fine
cars tumbled at the breakdown lanes. Why hadn’t she said something?

“Get down!” Dean yelled.

Kendra threw herself to the floor of the bus hard enough to slam the breath from her lungs. A second shot, and then a third. She scuttled back along the aisle until her feet were pressed against one of the dried food boxes. Hipshot stood over her, barking like mad at the sharp, ugly snaps of the rifle. She was afraid he might jump up on the seat, so she wrapped her arms around him and held him down.

Above her, the Twins fired through opposite windows. Terry was still in the driver’s seat, his eyes trained on the windshield. The bus’s
engine growled, idling.

“Easy on the ammo!” Terry yelled. “Don’t shoot what you can’t see.” He opened the bus’s door, yelled toward the tour bus up ahead. “Piranha!”

But Kendra was sure Piranha couldn’t hear him over the gunshots.

“We gotta move,” Terry said. “We can’t sit here and—”

A glass explosion.

Terry cried out
Ugh
with a bewildered look on his face. He clapped at his chest like a mosquito had bitten him. Terry had been shot!

Kendra immediately saw all the ways it could end: tumbling down the ravine in a tangle of limbs, trapped in flames, marched out one by one, rendered naked in the snow. She vowed that nothing could surprise her, and nothing short of death would destroy her. And if she didn’t survive, at least she’d met people who had made her want to try.

Kendra had no more room for fear.

She scrambled toward Terry, keeping low, ignoring the pinch of broken glass across her knees and elbows.

Terry fell from his seat, nearly on top of her. He smelled like blood.

“Hold still,” Kendra said. “Let me see it.”

Carefully, she peeled away the bloodstained shirt to try to see how badly he was hurt. She blinked with relief when she saw his chest was clear, and the bleeding was from his shoulder. Their faces were so close that their heads bumped.

“Am I shot?” Terry said.

A large sliver of glass was caught in the wound in the meat of his shoulder, and she yanked. Terry let out a strangled yell, but she didn’t think any had broken off.

“Glass got you,” Kendra said. “Not a gun.”

Terry examined himself, looking shocked and relieved. “
Damn,
I don’t ever wanna get shot.”

“Too bad,” Darius said. “Might’ve been your lucky day.”

Ursalina had just saved Sonia’s life—not once but twice.
She’d shot the man behind Piranha, then she’d pulled Sonia up against the Blue Beauty when the gunshots started, slamming her hard against the tire. Ursalina had pointed silently, telling her to hide beneath the bus.

Then Ursalina was gone. Sonia had seen Piranha’s feet when he jumped out of the tour bus, before he scrambled back for cover.
At least Piranha’s safe…

But where was Ursalina?

Sonia’s eyes were sweeping the snowdrifts in search of Ursalina when something sharpened to focus in the shadows: a snow-covered car was hidden beneath a grave-shaped mound of white. And a rifle poked a few inches out of that mound. God, she could see it so clearly now, even before the blip of light from the rifle’s bore.